Southern California wildfires continued for a third full day on Thursday. As predicted by meterologists, continued high winds continued to stoke at least five major fires throughout the Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Ventura County areas.

New evacuations were ordered for several coastal communities and at least one dead body has been found as a result of the flames in the mountain community of Ojai.

The fire in the Los Angeles suburb of Sylmar known as the Creek Fire has now consumed more than 12,600 acres with the blaze only 10 percent contained as of Thursday morning. Fifteen structures have now been destroyed by that fire with another 15 damaged and 2,500 other structures still threatened. An estimated 110,000 people had to be evacuated in the area according to Los Angeles Fire Captain Branden Silverman.

AS LOS ANGELES FIRES FORCE 200,000 TO EVACUATE, SAN DIEGO BLAZE SPARKS NEW ALARM Hurricane-force winds are making the devastating wildfires, which have scorched over 140,000 acres, worse. [HuffPost]

The Southern California wildfires raged for a fifth straight day Friday, with firefighters working round the clock in an attempt to keep them contained: here.

Apparently picking out victims at random, the gunman travelled from his home, where neighbors reported a domestic violence incident had occurred earlier, to several locations, including an elementary school, where two children were injured. None of the children were killed.

The first report of a shooter was made to police shortly before 8 a.m. and the suspect was confronted by police approximately 45 minutes later.

The gunman rammed a gate at the Rancho Tehama Elementary School with his vehicle and began to shoot up the school which had been placed on lockdown shortly after administrators received reports of a shooter in the area. Unable to gain access to any of the locked classrooms the gunman fired through the schools’ windows and walls of the building for nearly 30 minutes as more than 100 students, teachers, staff and parents hunkered down.

The rampage ended when police shot and killed the gunman as he attempted to flee.

A resident interviewed by local media, Brian Flint, identified the shooter as his neighbor, who he named only as Kevin, and reported that he had killed his roommate and stolen his truck before going on the rampage at the school.

Flint told media that his neighbor was “crazy” and had been recently shooting off hundreds of rounds at his home. “The crazy thing is, is that the neighbor has been shooting a lot of bullets lately, hundreds of rounds, large magazines. And, you know, we just, we made it aware that this guy was crazy and he’s been threatening us,” he said.

The responses of Republican Vice President Mike Pence and Democratic California Governor Brown to the latest mass killing, in the context of recent shootings in Texas and Nevada, were banal and perfunctory.

Praising the “courageous” law enforcement officers, Pence later tweeted “We pray for comfort & healing for all impacted.” Brown released a brief statement: “Anne and I are saddened to hear about today’s violence in Tehama County, which shockingly involved schoolchildren. We offer our condolences to the families who lost loved ones and unite with all Californians in grief.”

Since the Sutherland, Texas church shooting less than two weeks ago, in which 27 were killed, there have been 12 mass shootings, including Red Bluff, with 21 more killed and 45 wounded, according to mass shootingtracker.org. Over 2,100 people have been killed or wounded in mass shootings so far in 2017. This does not include the more than 1,000 killed by police.

The town of Red Bluff, with a population of slightly more than 14,000, is located 125 miles north of Sacramento. Nearly a quarter of the population lives in poverty. In 2015 the median income was $31,239 or less than that of half of the state as a whole.

Any effort at a serious accounting of the epidemic of mass killings in the United States would immediately come up against this social reality: the unprecedented growth of social inequality and a political system in which workers, youth and the poor have no voice.

So far, I have not seen media referring to this horrible crime in California as ‘terrorism‘. Maybe because the perpetrator seems to be not African American or Muslim?

FOUR DEAD AFTER SHOOTING AT NORTHERN CALIFORNIA ELEMENTARY SCHOOL At least 10 other people were wounded, including two students, after a gunman opened fire at multiple locations in a small Northern California community. In the aftermath, Twitter was quick to point out that Trump tweeted his condolences for the wrong mass shooting. [HuffPost]

CALIFORNIA SHOOTER KILLED HIS WIFE THE NIGHT BEFORE SHOOTING RAMPAGE And hid her body under the floorboards. [HuffPost]

‘THE GOP’S LATEST GUN BILL WOULD BE CATASTROPHIC FOR WOMEN FLEEING ABUSE’ House Republicans are expected to vote as early as Wednesday on legislation to expand the ability of out-of-state visitors to carry concealed guns. “Ruth Glenn, executive director for the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, said the House measure would effectively ‘zero out’ countless state laws designed to protect victims of abuse.” [HuffPost]

AND THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE WHO FAILED A BACKGROUND CHECK IN 2016 Were still able to buy a gun. [HuffPost]

A car drove into union-sponsored immigration protesters outside of GOP Representative Ed Royce’s office in the Los Angeles suburb of Brea last Thursday afternoon. The driver, 56-year-old Daniel Wenzek, was arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon. He has since been released from custody pending investigation.

Widely shared video of the incident shows Wenzek inching his car into protesters who had temporarily blocked a street crossing while walking across it. As more protesters gathered around screaming at him to stop, Wenzek accelerated while a protester lay on the hood of his car. Wenzek finally stopped his car approximately 50 feet into the intersection after running into a handful of police officers there to monitor the protest. …

While authorities have not determined how many protesters were injured as a result of the incident, SEIU United Workers West president David Huerta says four members and two staffers were taken to the hospital for evaluations.

While there were no fatalities reported after the Brea incident, the social media postings of Wenzek along with his overall personal history suggests a psychologically troubled individual with strong sympathies for the “alt-right” movement that inspired the Charlottesville killer.

More recently, Wenzek released posts criticizing Barack Obama for what he perceived to be the latter’s “socialism” and became a devotee of the right-wing Breitbart news web site. Wenzek specifically lamented the passing of Breitbart founder Andrew Breitbart in 2012. He wrote, “What a huge loss! Andrew Brietbart dies at age 43. Andrew you will be missed by millions of Americans who love this country. May God bless your wife and children.”

Wenzek also reportedly had difficulty maintaining employment as a result of his sex offender status, which was a source of frustration for him.

…

If the protesters were in any way a source of fear for Wenzek, the same could not be said for cops on the scene. After angry marchers were cleared away after his car finally stopped, video shows Wenzek being gently led away from his car by police. Based on that video footage, Wenzel was not handcuffed for at least the first 51 seconds after emerging from his car. During that time, he was not even physically touched by the police with the exception of a few reassuring taps on the shoulder.

By contrast, one angry protester who jumped on Wenzek’s car immediately after the incident was viciously thrown to the ground by officers.

… Permits had been obtained from the city of Brea for the march and a news conference had taken place in downtown Los Angeles earlier that morning.

A delivery was then attempted to Congressman Royce’s office containing personal appeals by union members to keep the Temporary Protected Status for immigrants (TPS) program intact. …

The protesters, associated with the Unite Here, SEIU and several other trade unions, were gathered outside of Royce’s office to support the preservation of the TPS program. TPS, enacted in 1990, applies to immigrants from certain countries in which deportation would imperil the immigrants’ safety. The list of such countries is determined by the Department of Homeland Security.

The protest was made in advance of looming deadlines for the Trump administration to recertify TPS status for several Central American Countries. These include Honduras and Nicaragua on November 5, Haiti by November 23 and El Salvador by January 8. The DHS recently terminated TPS for Sudan, prompting worries that a similar fate is in store for other TPS countries.

More than 300,000 foreign nationals covered by the TPS program currently live in the United States with the largest number—195,000—from El Salvador.

The TPS deadline arrives on the heels of the Trump administration’s repeal of the DACA program along with a massive crackdown on immigration generally. The DACA program, enacted by the Obama administration as a cover for its mass deportation of more than 3 million immigrants, provides a temporary reprieve from deportation for children of undocumented workers.

Under the terms of the DACA repeal, no new applications will be processed by the Department of Immigration while DACA status itself will be repealed on March 8, 2018, with the exception of some recipients who applied for a temporary extension by October 5.

ICE raids are also expected to escalate in advance of the March termination date. ICE acting director Thomas Homan announced earlier this month that agents will launch a series of raids in the state of California, which had previously declared itself a sanctuary state, meaning that local police would not request immigration status of suspects during routine operations.

California has the largest population of immigrants of any state in the country. According to the American Immigration Council, as of 2015 one in four residents is an immigrant, while one in four is a native-born US citizen with at least one immigrant parent. This means that half of the state’s population is either an immigrant or a child of an immigrant. Moreover, 2.4 million were undocumented while 4.7 million state residents lived with at least one undocumented family member.

According to figures compiled by the Migration Policy Institute, 20,000 teachers nationwide were DACA-eligible in 2016. The loss of even a tenth of these would have a catastrophic impact on pre-college education nationwide following years of budget cutting and layoffs.

In September, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer met with Trump to discuss rescinding the DACA repeal. In exchange, the two promised to work with the president to increase immigration enforcement.

After the meeting, Schumer could barely contain his excitement at getting an audience with the billionaire reality television star. “He likes us! He likes me, anyway,” Schumer enthused. “I said, ‘Mr. President, you are much better off if you can sometimes step right and sometimes step left. If you have to step in one direction, you’re boxed. He gets that.”

Schumer speaks for a section of the ruling elite that worries that the more openly anti-immigrant policy of the Trump administration may encourage and ignite social opposition that the Democrats will no longer be able to contain.

A day after meeting with Trump, Pelosi was shouted down by protesters at a news conference in San Francisco. Expressing solidarity with undocumented workers as a whole, a few score protesters shouted that the congresswoman would not make them “bargaining chips” in her negotiations with Trump. Others shouted slogans such as, “All of us or none of us” and “Shut down ICE!”

A BLACK MAN AND A WHITE WOMAN SAT DOWN AT A PUB And then the white supremacists showed up. [HuffPost]

Officials expect the death toll to rise as crews begin to reach heavily burned areas. Hundreds in flame-ravaged Sonoma County remain missing, and higher winds coupled with low humidity and parched lands could either hamper efforts to contain the fires or create new ones.

“We’re not out of the woods, and we’re not going to be out of the woods for a number of days to come,” Cal Fire Chief Ken Pimlott said at a news conference Wednesday. “We’re literally looking at explosive vegetation. These fires are burning actively during the day and at night.”

What makes these fast-moving fires particularly dangerous, Pimlott said, is that they “aren’t just in the backwoods. . . . These fires are burning in and around developed communities.”

Nearly two dozen large fires have been raging in the northern part of the state, sending thousands of residents to evacuation centers and burning roughly 170,000 acres — a collective area larger than the city of Chicago. That size is likely to grow.”

Over a week has passed since the most devastating fires in California history ignited Northern California. The death toll is still climbing, reaching 40 as of Sunday night. One hundred and seventy two people are still missing in Sonoma County, the hardest hit of the four affected counties, and another 74 are unaccounted for in neighboring Napa County.

Neither Napa nor Sonoma counties alerted residents of the fires through Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) systems. Despite the fact that such technology is readily available, many of the dead and injured were caught sleeping, completely unprepared for what was coming. In some cases the victims did not hear horns or the desperate knocking of neighbors. Many rural residents beyond the reach of local police departments were left with no warning at all, their limited escape routes quickly engulfed by flames.

But the Washington Post reported yesterday that in neighboring Lake County, due north of Sonoma, local officials did send out an emergency blast that activated all cellphones, “turning them into the equivalent of squawking alarms.” Untold lives were saved by this activation of the WEA. Lake County is the only affected county that has reported zero fire deaths.

According to the Post:

“Of the four counties in Northern California where residents were killed in fires this week, two—Sonoma and Mendocino—had agreements in place with FEMA that enabled them to send alerts. Yuba and Napa counties did not, according to federal records.”

In Sonoma, local officials justified their failure to activate wireless notification on the grounds that it would produce mass panic and “because the warning is not targeted,” a county spokesperson said, adding, “to keep everyone safe we chose not to use a mass alert that would have reached areas not affected by the fire.”

The result was a nightmare. In Santa Rosa, the largest city in Sonoma County, the smoke and heat of approaching flames woke people in residential neighborhoods shortly after 1:00 AM. “Something told me, death, go, leave,” Julie Pilacelli, a resident of Santa Rosa’s Hemlock Street told the Los Angeles Times.

By 1:30 AM, most of the of Pilacelli’s neighbors were waking each other up and fleeing their homes. There had been no warning, no phone calls, no alarms. Eventually a lone patrol car with a megaphone but no alarm sound drove up Hemlock telling people to leave. “We were left high and dry,” said Jimmy Warren, also of Hemlock Street. “No one was there to help.”

County officials claim that warning the population would have clogged roads, but they have offered no explanation as to why emergency services did not have a county-wide evacuation plan in place to prepare for the inevitability of large fires, a common occurrence in rural and semi-rural parts of Northern California.

This week’s fires have far surpassed previous fires in death and destruction because unlike previous rural wildfires, these were able to approach densely urban areas. In this case, entire residential neighborhoods were left sleeping without warning as flames swept down from the hills despite the fact that they are situated right next to highways and would have been easy to evacuate with proper warning.

A FEMA spokesperson told CNN on Saturday that contrary to Sonoma County government claims, agencies sending emergency notifications do have “the option of providing geographic coordinates defining the area where the alert is to be targeted” with basic information like the location of cell phone towers.

In response, another Sonoma County spokesperson gave residents cold comfort then she told CNN on Sunday, “It’s something we’ll absolutely be looking into as part of our after-action plan.” Sonoma County already has WEA capabilities, unlike Napa, which has reportedly not used WEAs.

Even those who did sign up for the alerts often received notice several hours after the flames had enveloped their neighborhoods. A reader of the World Socialist Web Site reported that his family in Sonoma County was only alerted of approaching fires by a call from a neighbor and barely made it out alive. Three hours after the family evacuated, they received their cell phone evacuation notice from the county.

Many elderly people were evacuated from residential nursing homes with just minutes to spare and without public warning. The San Francisco Chronicle’s growing list of the dead includes many elderly or infirm people who may have been able to survive had they been warned and evacuated in a timely manner.

Different levels of local and state government have responded with a blame game. Governor Jerry Brown also has the capacity to activate the warning system, but administration officials sought to pass the buck on to local officials: “From the state level we wouldn’t do that,” said Kelly Houston, deputy director of the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. “Alerts and warnings happen on a local level…They decide what are the appropriate alerts for their population.”

Sonoma County Sheriff Robert Giordano in turn blamed residents for failing to sign up for an emergency alert system that sends out texts in emergencies. “If you don’t sign your cellphone up, you don’t get that service,” Giordano said. “So the message is, sign up for SoCoAlerts if you live in this county.”

On Friday, a Sonoma County spokesman said that only 2 percent of the county’s 500,000 residents signed up for the emergency warning system, an indication of how little was done by the government to advertise the system.

Lake County officials explained their decision to activate the WEA system was simple: “We had folks that were in immediate danger, and wanting to notify them of the situation,” Police Lt. Corey Paulich said. Lake County regularly sends out WEAs for weather and criminal alerts. The county also uses an app called CodeRed which notifies residents of impending disasters. In short text messages, Lake County residents were told where the fire was and where their assigned evacuation center was located.

According to the federal government’s Ready.gov emergency preparedness website, WEAs “look like text messages, but are designed to get your attention and alert you with a unique sound and vibration.” They “are no more than 90 characters, and will include the type and time of the alert, any action you should take, as well as the agency issuing the alert.” They are simple, cheap, and effective, often used to send “Amber alerts”, warning drivers to be on the lookout for child abductors.

Sonoma County’s decision not to activate the WEA for fear of causing panic is not a justified “spur of the moment” judgment call. It betrays the government’s incompetence and its lack of confidence in its own evacuation emergency plans. Moreover, the county’s fears of causing panic indicate that county officials and police feared that social tensions in the county—and particularly in the working class and immigrant neighborhoods of Santa Rosa—have reached the point that a panic would produce riots or looting.

As in Houston after Hurricane Harvey, the task of saving lives and property falls to the working class. Thousands of firefighters have converged from all over the country into a veritable army that is combatting the flames in multi-day shifts. These firefighters continue to risk their lives to control the flames and have contained several of the fires. Despite the firefighters’ best efforts, high winds Saturday whipped up new fires like the large one that has now engulfed the Mayacamas mountain range, threatening the small towns of Kenwood, Glen Ellen, and Oakmont.

Reports indicate that up to one-third of all those fighting the flames are prisoners, paid just $1 per hour for the extremely dangerous job. Residents of the affected towns greet firefighters with massive rounds of applause wherever they are sighted in public and have even gathered to keep residents quiet in areas where firefighters are sleeping. Fire departments have had to issue public statements asking that the public cease donations of food and drink on account of the already overwhelming showing of public support.

The fires in Northern California continued to spread Thursday with little sign of diminishing. By the afternoon the death toll reached 31, making it the deadliest outbreak of wildfires in the state’s history. Nearly two dozen major fires have burned almost 200,000 acres since Sunday, causing rapid evacuations and widespread devastation.

Many of the largest fires continue to burn out of control with strong dry winds expected to continue to fan the flames today. The Atlas fire, which has burned over 40,000 acres near Napa, is only 3 percent contained. The Tubbs fire, which scoured Santa Rosa and threatens nearby Calistoga, is only 10 percent contained.

Most of the fires are currently burning in rural areas with a lower population but thousands of people are under mandatory evacuation orders.

The fires tore into the city of Santa Rosa, population 175,000, Sunday night and have forced the evacuation of Calistoga in the Napa Valley. At least 3,500 buildings have been destroyed across Sonoma, Mendocino, Napa, and Yuba counties. Roughly 400 people remain missing and the death toll is expected to rise well past the 29 people killed in Southern California’s Griffith Park fire of 1933.

The majority of deaths came from the initial burning of the northern part of Santa Rosa on Sunday night. Many people had to flee their homes after waking up in the middle of night to smoke before hearing of any evacuation orders.

The lack of modern emergency infrastructure became apparent in the early hours of the fire when emergency officials decided not to send out a mass cell phone alert because they could only send it to the entire county and not just those affected. Old methods of notifying evacuees like radio, auto-dialers, and door-to-door canvassing left many residents completely unaware of the fast approaching fire.

Details of those killed in the fires are starting to emerge—many of the victims were elderly or disabled and living in trailer homes. Sara and Charles Rippey, 98 and 100, died just a few months after their 75th wedding anniversary in their Napa home. Christina Hanson, 27, was confined to a wheelchair and died when her house burned.

Kai Sheperd, 14, died as his family tried to flee the Redwood Valley Fire. His family of four initially tried to escape the fire in two cars down a dirt road but proceeded on foot after the fire cut them off. Kai’s sister and parents suffered severe burns and remain hospitalized.

Nearly 8,000 firefighters have been trying to divert the fires from urban centers, and many are reaching the breaking point from constant work. “We’ve got guys who have been working 80 hours straight,” Captain Sean Norman, deputy head of operations for the Sonoma Valley fires, told the Los Angeles Times. Roughly a third of California’s firefighters are prisoners who work in these dangerous conditions for approximately $1 a day.

Reporters with the World Socialist Web Site traveled to evacuation centers in Sonoma County Thursday to speak with some of those affected.

Ed and his daughter Jasmine were at the Finley Community Center in Santa Rosa, after having to flee the nearby city of Calistoga. The fire reached their house in the middle of the night and they had to leave at 1 a.m. on Monday, before any official evacuation order was put in place. Ed worked as a mechanic but had to stop due to blood clots and Parkinson’s disease. Jasmine is a student and works at McDonald’s.

“We only took a few things with us, like our phones,” Jasmine said. “We’re not people who can afford electronics a lot of the time.” They went back to find everything they had left destroyed. “I don’t really know how we’ll recover,” Ed added.

“I’ve been here most of my life and I haven’t seen the government do much to prevent fires,” Ed continued. “Congress is paid a lot of money to do nothing.” Jasmine added, “The government should have recognized the danger sooner.”

Both noted the impact of rising housing prices and growing social inequality in the area. “Out here, there are a few expensive cars, but a lot of homeless people too,” Jasmine noted. “How can anyone make a living anymore when all their money goes to rent?”

While housing speculation has been a boon for real estate developers and financiers, infrastructure has been allowed to decay. State investigators are looking into whether the current fires were caused by poorly maintained power lines owned by the local utility monopoly Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E).

Around the same time the fires broke out Sunday night, dispatchers in Sonoma County received a spate of calls about downed power lines and sparking transformers, as PG&E’s outdated infrastructure faltered under heavy winds.

Chris, a volunteer at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds, had sharp words for the utility company: “PG&E does not have a good track record; that’s a fact! Why do we still have electrical wires above ground? That’s old infrastructure. The poles are around material that’s instantly combustible. Really the city should own those wires.”

In April PG&E was fined $8.3 million for failing to maintain a power line that sparked the 2015 Butte Fire in Amador County. In 1994, state regulators fined the company $30 million over its power lines in the Sierras and prosecutors claimed the company had diverted $80 million from its tree cutting program to profits.

Among the victims of the fires that have ripped through California’s wine country this week are thousands of undocumented workers, who make up the work force of vineyards, wineries and in tourism: here.

In California, powerful winds and bone-dry conditions are fueling massive wildfires. A state of emergency has been declared in northern areas as the fires have left at least 17 people dead, destroying whole neighborhoods and forcing 20,000 people to evacuate their homes. The wildfires come after the U.S. Forest Service warned last year that an unprecedented 5-year drought led to the deaths of more than 100 million trees in California, setting the stage for massive fires.

Climate scientists believe human-caused global warming played a major role in the drought. We speak with Park Williams, bioclimatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and co-author of a 2016 report showing that global warming is responsible for nearly half of the forest area burned in the western United States over the past three decades.

At least 23 dead as reports point to electrical infrastructure as possible cause of California fires

12 October 2017

Officials have raised the death toll in one of the most destructive wildfires in California history to 23 people. California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) Chief Ken Pimlott called the fires “a serious, critical, catastrophic event.” An estimated 8,000 firefighters are battling the blazes as fierce winds fan the flames that are devouring extra-dry vegetation.

Around 25,000 people have been evacuated from seven counties north of San Francisco and have set up in dozens of shelters. In Sonoma County alone, 5,000 people are taking refuge in 36 shelters according to officials. Many evacuees were unable to bring anything with them from their homes and have been told it may be weeks before they are able to return to check on what remains of their possessions.

The fires have left at least 180 people injured and have destroyed more than 3,500 homes and businesses. The number of dead and injured is expected to rise as emergency responders begin searching the wreckage of evacuated areas. Sonoma County officials said 670 people are still listed as missing from the fires in California wine country.

Exactly what caused the fires that have burned 170,000 acres since Sunday is not known. Cal Fire Chief Pimlott reported that the chance of a lightning strike sparking the fires was “minimal” and 95 percent of wildfires are started by people, intentionally or not.

However, as is the case with many “natural” disasters in the United States, such as the hurricanes which wreaked havoc over the last several months in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico, the criminal neglect of infrastructure in the interest of profit is a likely factor in the unfolding catastrophe in Northern California.

Reports have emerged that emergency dispatchers in Sonoma County received calls on Sunday night about multiple power lines falling and [electrical] transformers exploding.

According to a review of emergency radio traffic by the Bay Area News Group, Sonoma County dispatchers sent out fire crews to at least 10 different locations over a 90-minute period after receiving reports of sparking wires and other problems because of high winds.

Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), based in San Francisco, issued a statement acknowledging equipment troubles in the area but said questions about maintenance were “highly speculative.” As required by state law, the company must cut back trees from power lines to reduce the risk of lines being brought down by falling branches sparking fires. However, the company admitted in a statement that they found “wires down, broken poles and impacted infrastructure,” indicating that proper maintenance had not been carried out.

If PG&E were found to be responsible for the wildfires because of inadequate maintenance of power lines, it would not be the first time. Last April, the company was fined $8.3 million by the state Public Utilities Commission for failing to maintain a power line which started the Butte fire in Amador County in September 2015. That fire raged for 22 days and killed two people, destroying 549 homes and burning 70,868 acres.

PG&E was found guilty of 739 counts of negligence and fined nearly $30 million in 1994 for a fire near the town of Rough and Ready in Nevada County sparked by high voltage wires. State regulators found that the company had diverted almost $80 million from tree-cutting programs into profits.

In 2010, PG&E’s failure to maintain its natural gas lines led to the 2010 San Bruno explosion, which killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes. The company was fined $1.6 billion and a federal jury last year convicted the company on five charges of violating federal pipeline safety regulations, and one charge of obstructing an official National Transportation Safety Board probe.

Last year, Cal Fire announced it would force PG&E to pay $90 million in firefighting costs. In addition, more than 1,000 lawsuits relating to fires are pending against the company. However, these fines have amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist for a company which has seen annual profits surpass $1 billion in recent years.

Many of those reported missing from the fires are presumed to be staying with somebody else and have not checked in as safe on the official registry for missing persons. Concerned family members and friends have used social media to search for loved ones who have been impacted by one of the 22 fires currently burning in Northern California.

The fires regained momentum on Wednesday pushing flames through hills and vineyards as officials scrambled to evacuate some 2,000 residences in the city of Calistoga in Napa County. Deputies in neighboring Sonoma County were “running toward the fire, banging on doors, getting people out of their house,” Misit Harris, a Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman reported. “It’s rapidly changing, it’s moving quickly, it’s a very fluid situation,” she said. “The fire is growing.”

The worst of the fires, the Tubbs fire, which burned down portions of the city of Santa Rosa, has already killed 11 people since it erupted on Sunday, making it the deadliest wildfire in the state in 14 years. Together with the Atlas fire in Napa County, they had torched a combined 70,000 acres by Wednesday morning, according to Cal Fire.

Daniel Berlant, assistant deputy director for Cal Fire said, “This has been one of the deadliest weeks for fires that we’ve experienced in recent time.” Evacuation orders remain in place for areas which have been burned and have already resulted in three arrests. Residents have been warned not to return for at least another week.

The past two days have seen fires engulf heavily populated neighborhoods prompting residents to flee in the middle of the night having only minutes to grab their belongings.

Intense northern Diablo winds are expected to fuel and spread the wildfires until Thursday according to the National Weather Service. Firefighters have struggled in the face of the intense winds to contain the flames from threatening populated areas.

President Donald Trump responded to the disaster by approving inadequate federal emergency assistance to California, agreeing to an earlier request by Governor Jerry Brown. The assistance provides immediate funds for clearing debris and supplying evacuation centers.

For Governor Brown this will be the 10th time he has declared a state of emergency for wildfires this year alone. Already, 8 million acres have been burned as a result of almost 7,500 fires that have flared up across the state.

At nearly six months after hatching, this California Condor chick (#871) is primed to fledge at any point within the next 30–40 days. Watch the 20-pound nestling show off her impressive wingspan as she clumsily rambles around the Devil’s Gate nest in Southern California.

Who says Mondays aren’t any fun! Watch California Condor chick #871 burn off some energy while jumping around and flapping her wings in front of the camera. She gives us a great look at her blackish-gray colored head and down covered neck. #871 won’t be resembling her parents any time soon; it takes five years for a condor to fully obtain the reddish orange head coloration of an adult!